pilgrimage

creatress dressing green notions in snooty sooty ashen shards of breath

Women, globally and historically, do not travel very often; women stay home and raise little globetrotters. I am traveling as a woman, not as a man with man’s own freedom. It remains to define my experiences; I haven’t experienced them yet! I grapple with my approach now; the engines are roaring, as I cannot get off the ground if I’m not burning life yet.

We see ourselves travel as repairmen, as hedons, as colonists, as pilgrims. Surely all four are intertwined; yet it is not as if Jeff Sachs is Hugh Hefner is Francisco Pizarro is the Dalai Lama. I cannot intend to repair things as I prepare to study abroad. I reject hedonism, difficult as this may be when travel promises adventure, new sights sounds smells tastes touches, choices about “my dear time’s waste.” The trick, perhaps, is to let go old woes, old vices, let old values dissolve. What is most difficult is to avoid traveling as a colonist. How can I avoid colonizing Uganda, if only in my mind, let alone by my social interactions? For example – I could, even by default, analyze the reality of Uganda using only the frameworks I have sprouted by living in the seat of the empire and learning from Plato, Bonaventure, Dante, Montaigne, Eliot. If I do that, I have seen Uganda and Ugandans as I desire, not as they desire; as concepts, not as external to me; as know-predict-able, not as beautiful. What must be foremost is to travel as a pilgrim, though the other tendencies will emerge and splash in-and-out. If I mentally colonize foreign reality, I am not changed by seeing it and so I cannot be a pilgrim at all.

A friend loaned me a book of essays, Living In The World As If It Were Home, by Tim Lilburn. He is something of a modern Thoreau-gone-humble from what little I’ve read so far. In any case, he shares wisdom in the Preface:

The project to convert what is into product heaves forward almost everywhere; almost everything seems caught in the beam of this attention. While this goes on, I’ll go down to the river, I’ll look.

He just wants to look??! Whom does that help? How can he be so selfish? How can he avoid preparing to present his findings? Look where? For what; what is he seeking? Whatever he’s seeking, why does he also seek it in a tree? Or does he

Only look….

Pilgrims are people. They tell stories – the parson, the wife, the knight, the miller, the monk – for a moral and for fun. The stories serve these twin purposes for the moment, for the individual’s instants, but in every burning moment as history skips, these stories form the substance of their community. Their values, shared experiences, speech patterns, livelihoods, and skills are engrained as a larger narrative. They are journeying together, not separately. If they were not vulnerable, their pilgrimage would not be necessary because they would be financially free to buy whatever suited their fancy without enduring the hardships of even a shared journey. If they were utterly controlled by a powerful leader, that leader would have no use for such stories because the people would not be expected, maybe not even allowed, to pursue their own virtue.

Again, we see ourselves write as repairmen, as hedons, as colonists, as pilgrims. A wise friend once visited me, and before we parted she reminded me to write not for myself, not for others, not for the glory of an idea, but only for God, which is for love, which requires our true self. Rainer Maria Rilke:

You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

…As if no one had ever tried before. An aside from G.K. Chesterton:

Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and therefore left untried.

But Lilburn warns that poetry, inspired by beauty, perhaps, is itself “prone to be ‘beautiful and yet very untrue’….What leads poetry to misrepresent the world is poetry’s capacity to be ravished by the world.” [Excuse the metaphor?]

When, then, we see the reality of a place, any attempt to stabilize or describe its objective character – even using metaphor and word-sounds – is an attempt whose final result will be good, but not final. The living is final, the seeing, the journey, the community. Rilke:

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that - but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don't hate anything.

The two work together – Rilke’s base-jump into the practice of writing is because it is necessary to the poet’s existence, and Lilburn’s mere looking ends up being the telos of the living because poetry cannot be this much. Looking is not efficient nor does it need to have an effect; it is in itself an inspiration, a breathing of spirit, that is necessary to write with one’s existence at stake, to write only for sustenance.

Can looking and writing be enough for a pilgrimage?

They are at least necessary.